SOURCE: "Death and the Maiden," in The American Scholar, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 141-42, 144-45.

In the following review of Dear Departed, Begley provides an introduction to Yourcenar's major themes and worldview.

Marguerite Yourcenar's genius was such that she had at her command an extraordinary range of literary genres. Yet her oeuvre often tends to resist classification. Poetry informs all of her work, without exception. Two of her novels were awarded prizes for excellence in expository prose, and—with considerable justification—she elected to include a volume of prose poems in the collection of her fiction. It is not surprising, then, to find that Le labyrinthe du monde, which the author has called a memoir and some have labeled an autobiography, is, in reality, a three-volume chronicle of her family lineage, replete with polemical commentaries, and in which the writer scarcely appears on stage at all.

In Dear...